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Sunday, March 19, 2017

"As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, people need to make
sure it's not used by authoritarian regimes to centralize power and
target certain populations, Microsoft Research's Kate Crawford warned on
Sunday." continues CIO Today.

Photo: CIO Today

In her SXSW session, titled Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism,
Crawford, who studies the social impact of machine learning and
large-scale data systems, explained ways that automated systems and
their encoded biases can be misused, particularly when they fall into
the wrong hands.

"Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI,
something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing
authoritarianism and fascism," she said.

All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire
to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim
authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence
can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.

One of the key problems with artificial intelligence is that it is often
invisibly coded with human biases. She described a controversial piece
of research from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, where authors
claimed to have developed a system that could predict criminality based
on someone's facial features. The machine was trained on Chinese
government ID photos, analyzing the faces of criminals and non-criminals
to identify predictive features. The researchers claimed it was free
from bias.

"We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are
described as free from bias if it's been trained on human-generated
data," Crawford said. "Our biases are built into that training data."

In the Chinese research it turned out that the faces of criminals were
more unusual than those of law-abiding citizens. "People who had
dissimilar faces were more likely to be seen as untrustworthy by police
and judges. That's encoding bias," Crawford said. "This would be a
terrifying system for an autocrat to get his hand on." Read more... Source: CIO Today

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Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.